kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Brian F. G. Bidulock" <bidulock@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cirilo,

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:

> A down side to keeping things manageable (such as merging components
> into the PCB) would be that there has to be a mapping which KiCAD
> enforces for the integer layer ID and the usage. That is certainly
> possible and when implemented I suspect the biggest nuisance would be
> to people who use custom layers - but even that can be addressed by
> reserving a block of IDs which KiCAD will never use in the main tree.
> 
> Time is certainly the biggest thing; it would be great if we had
> corporate sponsors so people could dedicate their time to the code. I
> have so much free time that I haven't even been able to implement some
> rather simple features on the VRML export. Oh well, at least I managed
> to fix some simple bugs in the VRML code all those months ago when we
> moved to nanometer units.   It would be a great shame if Brian's work
> didn't eventually merge back into the main tree; I suspect that
> staging the changes would be at least one full time job though.  I
> was thinking of what minimal implementation of IDF3 import would be of
> use in KiCAD and I didn't realize that Brian had implemented enough
> new features to support all of IDF3 and much more.

In 2009-2010 I spent a full year coding on kicad, full time, just to
try and build one 10G board.  Not a single line of code was adopted.
It took 3 years for kicad to recreate the internal unit change that
I accomplished in the first 3 months.

I have never encountered a project so adverse to contributions (mind
you, I never tried to contribute to Gnome).  There is a real
opportunity for kicad with CERN.  They have the same objectives I
did: 10G boards or better.  They have many more better coders.
Their time is free to you.  They want IDF too, but also much more.
Hopefully they will just fork it when they discover that their
changes will never see the mainline.

--brian

-- 
Brian F. G. Bidulock    � The reasonable man adapts himself to the �
bidulock@xxxxxxxxxxx    � world; the unreasonable one persists in  �
http://www.openss7.org/ � trying  to adapt the  world  to himself. �
                        � Therefore  all  progress  depends on the �
                        � unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw �